eG Enterprise: Monitoring, Diagnosis and Reporting for Hyper-V Farms

eG Enterprise is a comprehensive solution for monitoring and managing all aspects of Hyper-V farms, whether the infrastructure is used to support virtual server or virtual desktop applications.

Using a 100% web-based architecture, eG Enterprise offers end-to-end monitoring of the Hyper-V virtual infrastructure, with a choice of either agent-based or agentless monitoring. Extensive, pre-defined, customized models are available for monitoring all components of the Hyper-V farm. Use eG Enteprise for immediate insights into Hyper-V performance:

Hyper-V servers

Backend database servers supporting the virtual infrastructure

Infrastructure servers, including:

Active Directory

Print servers

File servers

Storage devices

eG Enterprise also supports mixed environments where some applications execute on physical servers or a public cloud, to give you a single-pane-of-glass view of your entire infrastructure, end to end.

Best of Breed Hyper-V Monitoring Capabilities

From a Hyper-V monitoring perspective, eG Enterprise includes best of breed capabilities that help administrators easily track the health of their servers and VMs. Administrators are immediately alerted if abnormal usage patterns are detected and these same metrics also provide key insights for capacity analysis and planning:

Simplifying Virtual Machine Performance Management

The virtual machines running on the Hyper-V servers are auto-discovered and their relative CPU, memory, disk and network activity levels are tracked in real-time. Well-recognized bottleneck indicators such as CPU and disk queue lengths are monitored so performance degradations can be proactively reported.

Besides monitoring the resource usage of VMs, eG Enterprise hyper also embeds a patented inside and outside monitoring technology that allows the same agent/agentless monitor to provide details about the VM operating system and applications running on it. This key capability allows administrators to easily correlate the performance of a VM with the performance of applications running in the VM. The ability to get this level of detail without requiring agents on each of the VMs is a key capability of eG Enterprise.

Industry's First Virtualization-Aware Root-Cause Diagnosis Capability

Since there are so many components of a Hyper-V infrastructure, a monitoring solution can collect thousands of metrics. The challenge for an administrator is how to analyze metrics from Hyper-V monitoring tools to quickly determine where a performance bottleneck lies – is it in the network? database? application? virtual machine? storage? etc.

eG Enterprise dramatically simplifies this effort with pre-defined thresholds for key metrics based on industry standard best practices. Auto-baselines are also determined for important time-varying metrics and any deviation from the norm is immediately flagged to administrators proactively.

Once abnormalities are flagged from different layers and tiers in the infrastructure, eG Enterprise uses a patented virtualization-aware, automatic diagnosis technology to determine where the source of a problem lies. This technology auto-discovers various kinds of dependencies in the infrastructure including application to application dependencies, application to virtual machine mappings and virtual machine to physical machine dependencies.

A Hyper-V infrastructure can be dynamic (with VMs moving from one physical machine to another), and so eG Enterprise discovers these dependencies in real-time. The dependency information is then used to correlate between alerts from different tiers of the infrastructure. Root-cause alerts are assigned the highest severity, while effects of problems are downgraded in priority. With this capability, administrators now have actionable events – they can focus their attention on the root-cause of a problem and not be distracted by the effects.

From their web browsers, administrators also have access to personalized reports about the Hyper-V infrastructure. While executive reports offer high level overviews of performance that are ideal for C-level executives, operations reports offer detailed drilldowns that can be used for problem troubleshooting and diagnosis as well as for capacity planning.

What eG Enterprise for Hyper-V Reveals?

What is the CPU load on the hypervisor, on the root partition, and each of the virtual guests?

How many logical processors are currently supported by the hypervisor? Which logical processor is being used excessively? Who is making more use of the CPU resources - the VMs or the hypervisor?

Is the root partition consuming memory resources excessively?

How many virtual processors are currently utilized Which virtual processor is being utilized excessively? Who is making more use of the virtual processor - the parent partition? the hypervisor? or the VMs?

Which network adapter/switch is seeing the most traffic?

Are all critical Hyper-V processes and services up and running?

Virtual Guests Monitoring

How many virtual guest machines are running? What are their IP addresses/host names and operating systems?

How many virtual processors are currently supported by each VM? Is any VM utilizing the allocated CPU resources excessively?

What is the total disk capacity of each VM? Is any VM running out of disk space?

Which guest is using large memory pages?

Have Integration Components not been installed on any VM?

Is any VM experiencing network latencies?

Which processes on a guest are taking up high disk, CPU, and memory resources?

Is there excessive queuing for disk access on any guest operating system? Which applications could be causing these accesses?

Virtual Desktop Monitoring

How many desktops are powered on simultaneously on the Hyper-V server?

Which users are logged on and when did each user login?

How much CPU, memory, disk and network resources is each desktop taking?

What is the typical duration of a user session?

Who has the peak usage times?

What applications are running on each desktop

VM Migration Monitoring

HowWhich Hyper-V server is a virtual guest running on?

When was a guest moved from a Hyper-V server? Which Hyper-v server was the guest moved to?

Why was the guest migrated? What activities on the Hyper-V host caused the migration?